A U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman would not comment Friday on reports that the agency is investigating patent management firm MPEG LA for allegedly trying to suppress an open-source video compression format supported by Google.

The Wall Street Journal said Thursday that the DOJ has launched an antitrust investigation of MPEG LA over a long-standing dispute with Google and its rival VP8 video codec.

MPEG LA officials have claimed that the VP8 video codec uses patents managed the company. MPEG LA, which manages patents related to the high-definition video encoding standard H.264, announced in February it was looking for patents "essential" to the VP8 video codec.